Anthony M. Townsend - Smart Cities - Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

Before it ever comes close to collapse, we might tear down the walls of the smart city ourselves, for they will be the ultimate setup for surveillance. Will smart cities become the digital analogue of the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham’s 1791 prison design, where the presence of an unseen watcher kept order more effectively than the strongest bars? In the 1990s, the Surveillance Camera Players staged sidewalk performances at camera locations in New York City to protest the rapid spread of video monitoring in public spaces. As we install countless new devices that record, recognize, influence, and control our movements and behaviors, this whimsical dissent will seem quaint in retrospection. For as the true value of these technologies for governments and corporations to spy on citizens and consumers alike becomes apparent, the seeds of distrust will bloom. In 2012, concerned about the risks of face-recognition technology, US Senator Al Franken said, “You can change your password, and you can get a new credit card, but you can’t change your fingerprint, you can’t change your face—unless, I guess, you go through a great deal of trouble.”'' But devious countermeasures are already spreading. In the place of protest, more pragmatic responses are popping up, like Adam Harvey’s CV Dazzle. A face-painting scheme based on World War I antisubmarine camouflage, CV Dazzle is designed to confuse face-recognition algorithms.'

A New Civics

If the history of city building in the last century tells us anything, it is that the unintended consequences of new technologies often dwarf their intended design. Motorization promised to save city dwellers from the piles of horse manure that clogged nineteenth-century streets and deliver us from a shroud of factory smoke back to nature. Instead, it scarred the countryside with sprawl and rendered us sedentary and obese. If we don’t think critically now about the technology we put in place for the next century of cities, we can only look forward to all the unpleasant surprises they hold in store for us.

But that’s only if we continue doing business as usual. We can stack the deck and improve the odds, but we need to completely rethink our approach to the opportunities and challenges of building smart cities. We need to question the confidence of tech-industry giants, and organize the local innovation that’s blossoming at the grassroots into a truly global movement. We need to push our civic leaders to think more about long-term survival and less about short-term gain, more about cooperation than competition. Most importantly, we need to take the wheel back from the engineers, and let people and communities decide where we should steer.

People often ask me, “What is a smart city?” It’s a hard question to answer. “Smart” is a problematic word that has come to mean a million things. Soon, it may take its place alongside the handful of international cognates—vaguely evocative terms like “sustainability” and “globalization”—that no one bothers to translate because there’s no consensus about what they actually mean. When people talk about smart cities, they often cast a wide net that pulls in every new public-service innovation from bike sharing to pop-up parks. The broad view is important, since cities must be viewed holistically. Simply installing some new technology, no matter how elegant or powerful, cannot solve a city’s problems in isolation. But there really is something going on here—information technology is clearly going to be a big part of the solution. It deserves treatment on its own. In this book, I take a more focused view and define smart cities as places where information technology is combined with infrastructure, architecture, everyday objects, and even our bodies to address social, economic, and environmental problems.

I think the more important and interesting question is, “what do you want a smart city to be?” We need to focus on how we shape the technology we employ in future cities. There are many different visions of what the opportunity is. Ask an IBM engineer and he will tell you about the potential for efficiency and optimization. Ask an app developer and she will paint a vision of novel social interactions and experiences in public places. Ask a mayor and it’s all about participation and democracy. In truth, smart cities should strive for all of these things.

There are trade-offs between these competing goals for smart cities. The urgent challenge is weaving together solutions that integrate these aims and mitigate conflicts. Smart cities need to be efficient but also preserve opportunities for spontaneity, serendipity, and sociability. If we program all of the randomness out, we’ll have turned them from rich, living organisms into dull mechanical automatons. They need to be secure, but not at the risk of becoming surveillance chambers. They need to be open and participatory, but provide enough support structure for those who lack the resources to self-organize. More than anything else, they need to be inclusive. In her most influential book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities , the acclaimed urbanist Jane Jacobs argued that “cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”39 Yet over fifty years later, as we set out to create the smart cities of the twenty- first century, we seem to have again forgotten this hard-learned truth.

But there is hope that a new civic order will arise in smart cities, and pull every last one of us into the effort to make them better places. Cities used to be full of strangers and chance encounters. Today we can mine the social graph in an instant by simply taking a photo. Algorithms churn in the cloud, telling the little things in our pocket where we should eat and whom we should date. It’s a jarring transformation. But even as old norms fade into the past, we’re learning new ways to thrive on mass connectedness. A sharing economy has mushroomed overnight, as people swap everything from spare bedrooms to cars, in a synergistic exploitation of new technology and more earth-friendly consumption. Online social networks are leaking back into the thriving urban habitats where they were born in countless promising ways.

These developments are our first baby steps in fashioning a new civics for smart cities. The last chapter of this book lays out the tenets I think can guide us in navigating the decisions we’ll make in the coming decade as we deploy these technologies in our communities.

Your Guide

For the last fifteen years, I’ve watched the struggle over how to build smart cities evolve from the trenches. I’ve studied and critiqued these efforts, designed parts of them myself, and cheered others along. I’ve written forecasts for big companies as they sized up the market, worked with start-ups and civic hackers toiling away at the grass roots, and advised politicians and policy wonks trying to push reluctant governments into a new era. I understand and share much of their agendas.

But I’ve also seen my share of gaps, shortfalls, and misguided assumptions in the visions and initiatives that have been carried forth under the banner of smart cities. And so I’m going to play the roles of myth buster, whistle-blower, and skeptic in one. New technologies inspire us to dream up new ways of living. The promise of technological fixes to complex social, economic, and environmental problems is seductive. Many of the people you will encounter in this book have placed their bet on a better future delivered through technology. Not me. I get nervous when I hear people talk about how technology is going to change the world. I have been around technology enough to know its vast potential, but also its severe limitations. When coarsely applied to complex problems, technology often fails.